Team Roles Needed for Social Software Projects

I have a lot of hands-on designing, developing, and managing of social / collaborative platforms since 1996 and regularly advise product makers, vendors, and buyers around right fitting and understanding then working on solving problems they may have. One of the things that was regularly surfacing around 2007 as enterprise social platforms were getting taken seriously. But tool selection and roll out of them was often bumpy at best as there was a lack of the breadth of understanding around many services. This was the case with many vendors, but also really much the case on the customer side of things. When working through discovery of the problems that customers were having, usually in the “One Year Club”, many of the issues correlated to the lack of understanding the breadth of perspectives important to social and collaborative work and environments.

Looking at situations where products were right fits gave insight into what works well. The success factors surfaced where vendors with well rounded products that were correct fits for certain customers [commercial social platforms that understand social interactions at various scales and get their products right for specific users] and roll outs that have rather solid adoption. These all had breadth and depth of understanding. Looking at what helped them be successful it wasn’t one or two things, nor five, it was they had most of 14 different roles with roles in their selection, development, strategy, planning, launch, and running of their offering covered.

If you wanted to have success it became clear that having breadth and depth with these 14 roles would provide a good team that could help work through many, if not all the difficult struggles most social software / services rollouts and programs running face at one point or another. When looking across many of the projects I worked with in the One Year Club category (or colleagues who were working with programs that needed help) most of the efforts didn’t have the 14 roles covered. Most had 2 to 4 roles covered at best.

This gap was glaringly apparent when large parts of a rollout were in the custom build model, much like many organizations were struggling with around Microsoft SharePoint or other build your own solution platforms. Organizations weren’t buying finished products, but a platform that focussed on heavy customization (often with difficulty getting what they hope to do working well). Part was what came out of the box from SharePoint was a bit rough (3rd party solutions like Newsgator/Sitrion were quick ways to get things working well for social and collaboration needs in SharePoint with little hassle). What the teams working on SharePoint were lacking were 10 to 12 roles that they desperately needed for depth of understanding around how humans are social, how things function, ease of use in contexts, and other essential needs.

Moneyball of Social Software Teams

This breaks down the 14 roles at a somewhat high level. At times myself and others have called this the Moneyball system of social software. In baseball, which Moneyball focussed on, they focussed on what made the Oakland Athletics team with a low budget able to compete with large budget teams. Big budget teams focussed on home runs and star pitching along with other simple understandings of analysis. What the Oakland Athletics did was look at what makes a winning team and how to measure things based on outcomes by understanding things more broadly and deeply.

What I ran into was similar, though understanding the roles and needs to have a solid well rounded social software team, so to get solid successful results. Most solutions were rolled out with 2 to 5 roles with depth, but what are the other factors that also have deep value and because they were missing had a less than positive impact? Over the last 6 years or more I’ve shared this list of 14 in workshops and with long engagement clients (but at a deeper level), but also help them cover the ground across a few of them where I have that depth and breadth (from 20 years of experience with social software and formal learning).

One last thing to realize with this list, particularly if you are on the customer side, is you may not have these skills and roles, but your software or service provider cover some you are missing or help narrow the gaps for roles missing.

The 14 Social Software Roles for a Solid Team

IT Development

IT development is usually the one role that social software rollouts have covered. The development portion and getting the code right is often not an issue. This role covers development, integrations, stability, and upgrades / patches.

Content management

Content managers are incredibly helpful not only with content management practices and needs, but could also cover content strategy needs as well (if content strategy isn’t there working with communication specialist helps close this need). Most social environments have professionally created content that are part of their offerings as blogs or other more planned content models. But, content also surfaces out of conversations and cooperative activities in communities and groups. This content can be repurposed as it is or honed for other targeted and / or broad uses. Content managers also often works with document management and taxonomy roles for ease of finding and helping keep content well structured and easily found.

Community management

The community manager is a role that some organizations and services understand the need for to be successful. Others have yet to understand the need for this yet. Having a solid community manager who can help set the tone and culture of the community and groups, as well as help set good skills and practices in place for members of the social offering is a great asset. The community manager is the guide, host, and facilitator, but often has good depth working with difficult situations and turning them into very good outcomes. Good community managers are also adept at seeing needs and gaps in tools and services that need attention. A good community manager can’t fix a tool that isn’t a good fit for an organization, but can help get through that state to one that is a better fit, then help the better fit thrive.

Communication management

Solid communications management folks help with finding solid messages and well created content into a social environment. But, from a social perspective they also should have strength seeing content from users in the social environment that needs attention (as it is positive and needs more exposure, or it is negative and needs a calm way handling of it). Understanding the life cycles of content and workflows around finding, creating, honing, and right fitting content and messages shared from the organization as well as from the users is powerful and helps bring life to the social environment. Setting good content guidelines is another way the communication management role contribute to social environment success.

UX general design

User experience design is essential and has long been overlooked in enterprise until lately, as the focus services being designed for use and ease of use weren’t considered as needed when you could just send people to hours of training. But, with social offerings there are a lot of diverse elements that people are having to work through, besides how to get something done in a platforms or service. Good usable design with regular user research (prior to taking steps, as well as while designing potential options, and honing what is in place) helps take the rough edges off that get in the way of people using as well as understanding what a service does, and can do.

Social interaction design

General UX design isn’t enough with social platforms as there are a lot of interactions with the service and system, which is used to interact with others (which is difficult for many on its own). Understanding the design of social interactions (what is clicked and then what happens after it) so that the tools aren’t getting in the way, but also some of the rough edges of human social interactions are also eased is badly needed. There are broad options for buttons, forms, profiles, reactions, likes, etc. and social interactions designers work to understand what are the best fits for the contexts at hand and what the impacts will likely be with distinct user groups. User testing around social is a little different from general user testing as the situation requires working with a diversity of end points (people) at either end of what is put in place that need to be understood. Testing also needs to include various depth of use and maturity with the service. These help find a good fit in the social interaction design that works well.

Data analyst

Data analysts are essential to help understand benchmarks prior to starting down the path with social offerings, but also are needed to dig into the data to see how people are and aren’t using the services. Many platforms have decent data analysis, but it only scratches the surface and much better analysis is needed; particularly in larger solutions, more mature use environments, scaling, as well as those that have a diverse user segmentation. Social environments change drastically as they grow and act differently with more diversity as they scale. Data analysts should have good understanding of Social Network Analysis (SNA) / Organizational Network Analysis (ONA as well as many social analytics capabilities for seeing diversity, clustering, social scaling changes, etc. Having a solid data analyst helping with capturing the data that is needed, keeping privacy in mind, and slicing and making sense of the data with clarity has a big impact with what deeply matters in early stages and as use scales and matures.

Change management

Change management is not only essential for preparing organizations and people for a new service and offering, but deeply needed for the changes that come along with using these services. Digital social environments help enable normal networked social patterns that are well covered in Wirearchy as the shifts in ease of connecting in a digitally enabled networked environment can be disruptive. This is mostly in a positive way, but is not always perceived as positive if it is not known the changes may be coming. Helping people understand what the new services do and the needed mental models for working in this way are areas change managers can help with, as well as work with others around legal and compliance issues that need consideration.

Document management

Document management, with a solid understanding of social environments, helps with working through how to archive valuable content and conversations, but also how to ease finding and connecting to systems of record from inside a social offering. This connection needs to work in both directions, one is surfacing documents and resourceswell (within permissions guidelines, compliance, and connecting to the right / latest version), but also working out how to show the document or record is being discussed and used. This use activity around a record can be a valuable indicator that it may be getting updated, or caveats have surfaced that are valuable to all who view and need the record.

Social scientists (ethnographer, urban planner, sociologist, etc.)

The social scientists are often overlooked, but should be one of the first roles included. Social scientist, particularly those who have graduate school level of work, see social environments differently than most who don’t have that background (this may be a personal bias, but talking with others with similar background the “how was this essential understanding not seen” is a common phrase in reviewing social offerings). Social environments are under constant change and morph as (sub-)cultures intersect and social environments scale. The questions asked by social scientists, along with framings with models around how humans interact, while watching for conflict and the patterns that surface in constant change and are not seen are nothing less than essential. One of the common downfalls with social platforms is around they often don’t allow people to be social like humans are social. There is no better way to keep an eye out for that to mitigate for it, but also understand how humans are social at various scales than having social scientists involved.

Taxonomist/folksonomist

Taxonomies are essential for easily grouping information, conversations, and content and for helping people find relevant and related matter. But, language and mental models for what things are called and are related to are often far more diverse and emergent than taxonomies allow for, so embracing folksonomy is also essential for social environments. Having a taxonomist involved will help set categories and information structures in place that will enable the capability for solid finding and refinding. If that taxonomist also embraces folksonomies (and the service has the foundation for it) the ability to have emergent taxonomies that take less work to keep up to date than traditional taxonomies can happen. Also embracing folksonomy helps new ideas and mental models (these emerge through new members, training, cultural shifts, etc.) be included in the ease of finding and grouping of findable and refindable information.

Knowledge management

Knowledge managers seem to be in and out of fashion in organizations these days, but no matter what the rest of an organization believes having solid knowledge management as part of the social software team is essential. Early social platforms were around 20 years ago were being built on understandings for how knowledge is created and honed, as well as changes over time. The social platforms had issues, but the foundations in knowledge management are solid. The knowledge manager provide understanding in what the services need to capture knowledge and resurface it when needed. But, in social platforms the “who” around knowledge is helpful as well. Often there is more than one person with expertise who has honed a different dimension of a full understanding, so it isn’t just one answer that is sought and one expert, but likely a few or many.

Search specialist

With all of the conversation, content, information, and knowledge created, shared, and pointed to it doesn’t matter much if it can’t be found. Part of it getting found is helped by content managers and taxonomists / folksonomists, but search needs to be solid as well. Most platforms have search built in to their offerings, but evaluating if that search will suffice at various scales will need a search specialist. But, search in platforms is also often tied to other search systems and how those integrate to find, hold onto, and surface information, content, and resources takes solid search specialists to get right. A lot of information and resources inside an organization is difficult to find (not by intent, but it is trapped in systems that aren’t searched easily nor integrated well) and social environments often point to these resources and frame what is there, which enables that content and resource surface in searches. Your whole organizations gets smarter and has more available resources if the social environment and search is well matched.

Legal

Legal resources are often not thought of until it is late in the process. Working with lawyers to help understand compliance, privacy, security, and risks in general from a legal perspective. Working with a lawyer who can help understand not to just say this can’t be done, but how to meet compliance and other needs and still have a great service is an amazing benefit and one that saves budget and time down the road helping meet needs and provide a solid offering.

How to Fill These Roles

Yes, 14 roles isn’t something that is easy to fill. But, this doesn’t need to be 14 different people. By knowing what to look for a lot of roles can be found and covered by one individual. Knowing what you need, often at a little deeper level than the high level outlined here, and how it fits in to the team can help shape a team of 5 or 6 people, or who can move in and out of the team at various times to help provide the breadth and depth needed.

Also, many of these roles can be and are covered by vendors who are doing things well. As walked through in The One Social Way or Not to Doing Social Really Well in Enterprise user research and other skills are being covered on the product side. Understanding from vendors how they test with users (what types of users - domain, roles, skills, etc.), how they understand social models and social scaling, build taxonomies or enable co-existing folksonomy for emergent taxonomy, enable search and integrate with existing search, have open models for data analysis, etc. can help see what roles are still needed.

Many of these roles (even if they are covered on the vendor side) are really good to have in the evaluation and selection process as well, so having these roles in a review and strategy team up front is a really good idea as well.

These roles also can be filled by integrators. This is rather rare these days, with the exception of a few small boutiques who have approached their offerings for integration and consulting by filling gaps they regularly saw as well. Many integrators are strong on the technical side and today often have good general UX people, change managers, and search integrators, but other roles with more depth around social science and social interaction design is not a focus most have had nor have considered.

Between vendors, good integrators, consultants, strategists, and in-house resources and hires it shouldn’t be that difficult to get the 14 roles covered in one way or another now that you know to look for them.

Diversity of Enterprise Social Tools

One constant in the 20 years I've been working in and around organizations and their social platforms is lack of understanding of the diversity of tool types. Today that lack of understanding of the diversity continues, but the diversity and the dimensions in that diversity have increased. Since 2004 I've run workshops, given talks, written about this diversity and worked with a lot of organizations (and vendors) to better understand this diversity.

Most organizations learn about the complexity and diversity the hard way, when they realize one size doesn't fit all and trying to force that makes a mess. This starts a path of discovery, which starts with realization they need far better understanding.

This is a very high level breakdown of that tip of that understanding (features and functionality stated are not exhaustive, but used here to validate the differences). Over the years I have modified the names of the components in the diverse offerings based on need. Each of these components have different features and functionality along with different social interaction design models that map to the needs they are addressing.

Collective

The Collective social tools focus on gathering information and knowledge with an aim of being complete and having a full understanding. It is a tool type important for law firms, research and development, competitive assessment, brainstorming, general research, and more. Those people whom are participating are not necessarily focussed on others, but on capturing information and knowledge with a focus on completeness.

Collective services usually also have organizational capability for structure, categories, tagging, and sometimes curation. There can be discussion on or around elements in the service. There are often also alerts for new additions to collective area where one is participating. These services are not to be confused with general file storage services, which have different purposes and functionality.

Cooperative

The Cooperative (formerly I labelled this as community and then as team / group / community / network stack) focusses on sharing. This type of service is often considered "social" generically. The Group and Community levels are often the focus when talking about Enterprise Social Network (ESN) class of social offering. Across the cooperative services sharing, discussion, and interacting with others are the focus. But, there are different features and functionality and social interaction models at the different scales within the cooperative service dimension.

Team

The Team services in the Cooperative dimension focus on teams that are working together on a project. The Team services focus on relatively small groups up to around 15 or so members. The people know each other, or are getting to know each other, so have some comfort working out loud. Team focussed service include focus on tasks, responsibilities, progress, status, calendar, etc. in addition to sharing ideas, work, voting, and other common social interactions.

Many organizations try running teams in tools and services focussed on Group and Community dimensions, but find that is a really difficult fit as they are missing the core elements needed to for teams. Team focussed service are abundant and many organizations have more than one service focussed on Teams to fit diverse team work models in organizations. Team tools are also not intended to scale to large groups of people interacting and lack of features and functionality for larger scales are often not included.

Group

Group focussed services are aimed at subject focussed discussions and sharing of information and knowledge. Group services are often focussed to serve a few hundred or more in group spaces. Threaded discussions are common as well as the ability to tag within and sometimes across spaces.

Groups services also often focus on networked individuals and being able to follow not only subjects, but people. Group services are often used with a focus on knowledge and information capture and reuse.

Community

Community focussed services are aimed at scaling across an organization. Often service that focus here talk about these services as social intranets. Sharing of information in work related structures spaces and groups is the focus. Community services focus on keeping information up to date and current.

Community services tend to have some reflection of organizational structure and traditional departments (HR, product, sales, etc.) as well as subject focussed areas, like the Group services offer. Community services have broader reach, but often also have governance and compliance capabilities built-in or easy add-on services.

Network

The Network scale focusses not only to encompass everybody in an organization, but also service as a facility for working with trusted partners (consultants, contractors, business partners, and even customers). The working beyond the boundaries of the organization easily and how those relationships are set with boundaries of shared participation are a common focus.

The scaling for Network focussed services is a big focus. They can be tailored to follow supply chain and have open communication / sharing of events and discussion in-line with these services. Often the configurations can be broad, but often they don't do everything well, particularly where Teams and Group scale services focus. Permissions, federated spaces (more than one segment can own what is within a space).

Real Collaboration

Real Collaboration is where conflict, criticism, and diverse options worked through are common and required to get resolution. While other dimensions are focussed many views and breadth as a final result, the final result of collaboration is one output from the collaborative work of many. These services focus on working together openly in the creation, decision making, and have the capability to enable negotiation, mitigation, and decision capturing. Capturing decisions (what options are moving forward and what isn't selected) are essential in organizations that want to move quickly, intelligently, and efficiently. Often the decision of options not chosen and why are more valuable down the road that the what is selected as things change over time and knowing the other options and the reasoning for not selecting them can greatly reduce transition and iteration time to better hone a solution to changing realities.

Cooperation and Collaboration are not often clear, but Cooperation has many people working together in roles that coordinate efforts as the result of teams and other levels. But, Collaboration is work, ideas, approaches, and perspectives overlapping and need to be worked out which of them works best as part of the whole.

Sadly, this is a term used for many products, but the services do not remotely offer features and functionality that enable real collaborative creation, editing, nor working through and capturing all decision points.

Communication

This past year or two I went back to including Communication services (particularly open node where the communication is open to see over time, not closed node as in email where new participants to a group have not background of history not salient junctures) as they have become a category that stands alone again. General communication services can be targeted at teams, groups, or other larger scales, but are most common with smaller scale environments.

These services are the conversational glue around and between the different services. They can connect the various services and act as and umbrella for the other services as an aggregation point for streams to monitor, search, filter, and converse back into other services. Communication services focus on the conversation between individuals and groups in an open manner, but also serve as an alert system for what is going on inside other services.

Closing

This break down of the diversity into smaller actual dimensions, which may not have clear lines of distinction at time, is essential to understand. Focussing on getting the fit right for an organization requires understanding their gaps, needs, and problems they are hoping to address first (that often doesn't happen first as getting a poorly fit tool often is a good driver to understand values derived and where there are areas that must be addressed) before selecting and framing what a collection of tools that fit the diverse needs would look like.

This is just one of The Lenses in my Social Lenses workshop for clients and in groups (online and off). I will be offering a paid online workshop in the near future if you would like to learn more.

Slack is more than chat: Why it is the trojan horse to better enterprise

During the last couple of years, since Slack has been publicly available, it has taken off like wildfire. To many it is "just a chat service", which gets derided and belittled like most chat services do. This is until they find that chat has not only a place in organizations it has lasting value in organizations, proven out over the last 5 to 8 years (if not longer). Slack, much like prior chat services, do really well in organizations. As a "presence service" (is the person at their desk or available) and a means to ask a quick question or have a quick discussion (synchronously or asynchronously). Over the last 5 to 8 years chat and messaging services took off in organizations. This is not they took off and became popular in pockets of organizations, but have become standard tools everywhere. Messaging not only became the norm, but in many (if not most) organization the messaging platform is second most used service behind email (often Outlook) that is centrally supplied and supported (I know a few organizations where messaging is used more than email and is their most used application / service).

If the email client is Outlook, more than likely the messaging service has been Lync (now rebranding to Skype for Business). The downside to Lync isn't that it is used heavily, but it isn't supported well enough with archiving and with solid search capability. Many IT shops say all the messaging (even if just text based) would eat loads of space to store it. It is a capacity problem in IT's perspective, which when broken down on a per person level it is less than a few gigs of text per year that are created from active users. The last few years Lync has been used heavily for internal voice and video (where allowed) messaging, which not only eats storage at a faster rate, but voice search is still not commercially available with good enough accuracy at a low enough price to be viable for voice in practice. The last issue has little to do with capacity, but is compliance focussed and storing of messages isn't seen as compatible with the organization's policies, which means many of their other knowledge capture capabilities are likely crippled to some degree as well. But, for organizations that believe storing messages and supplying really solid search is limited by capacity constraints a tool like Slack becomes the organization's dream.

So, Slack is a better messaging service?

Well, Slack didn't become popular (these days try and find an organization that isn't using Slack in it somewhere and paying to use it) because it was just another messaging service. There are loads of chat and messaging services for business and enterprise, like HipChat (the largest most similar product), Lync / Skype for Business, Jabber based services, or other less capable services that were developed by those who misbelieve chat is just simple and easy to make. What has Slack standing out is (similar to HipChat) syncing across all platforms, from your pocket, to your desk, or on your coffee table / sofa. But, unlike HipChat, Slack stood out for being not only easy to use, but fun to use. Part of this is the helpful Slackbot that guides users and provides assistance with a playful, yet helpful personality (personality that fits a service and need is incredibly helpful with bots is it help discern with service and bot you are interacting with in our lovely human brains) as well as the myriad of other bots that are available to add in.

Why is Slack people's buddy?

But, this isn't the whole reason Slack is being used, spreading widely, and relatively quickly. Slack is more than chat, which can be used quickly to interact with others and keep information out of email. But, Slack and its personality(ies) address some most acute pain points that are in every organization: Knowledge capture and retrieval; Search; and Interoperability / integration. All three of these organizational maladies not only have long been problematic most of the "solutions" for them over the years suck (to put it politely) for the people using them.

It is important to keep in mind Slack is founded and built by game developers who focus on creating fun and engaging environments. They deeply get staying away from creating pain points for customers / users, as well as reducing them - this isn’t the clicksperts gamification, it is real game mechanics and game design models / theory at work.

Knowledge capture and retrieval

Email has for more than a decade or two been known as the death bed for knowledge in organizations where things are captured and shared are never to be seen again. Yes, think of the cesspit that is email (we've known this problem for 20+ years) with each email little envelope not as that nice friendly symbol but as a tombstone for the dead / never to be live again knowledge within it. It is now you have got the reality of the last 20 plus years. But, more open systems that allow for capturing, sharing, and most importantly searching have really good value to move things forward.

Many organizations value capturing the knowledge they create and have within it. They also have interest in having that knowledge shared and found by others who can benefit from it, so the organization gets smarter faster. The key pain point is capturing what is known, often this is set as a separate set of actions and activities from what people do in their regular workflows and conversation / interaction models. This separation of flow and spaces decreases the use of the knowledge services. These separate services have their place and value as spaces and places for focussed (either team task focussed, project relevant investigations, or subject interest focussed) discussion and development of ideas. But, the conversations that happen in the flow of work are valuable to capture as they happen, then have them addressable / linkable and searchable.

Services that capture conversation and communication in open, historically captured, and addressable spaces have long been far more valuable than email. This value is replicated often with the ever present situation of bring somebody new into the team, project, and / or conversation. The context and history is there to be seen, the important items can be marked or pinned in a manner so they stand out as well as getting context around those items in their original context. Getting a new person conversant and in the flow of things (as well as not out of the loop in conversations that are current) is incredibly valuable when trying to get things done and done well.

Slack provides that means to capture the conversations as they happen. It provides the means to pin (and now with emoji responses, a hackable means) relevant valuable chunks of the conversations and streams.

Good search (yes, you read that right)

Search in and across enterprise, is often painful as it is not very good at finding things. One of the benefits of Slack for many is the search is quite good. Not only is Slack good at retrieving past messages and conversations, but anything that is linked to in Slack or attached as shared objects (text related or with text metadata) in Slack all become searchable. When the linked items or objects are returned in search they are surfaced within the context of the conversation they were shared. People using Slack in organizations have been amazed with the quality of search for finding and refinding shared knowledge and resources, but also relating the item to why and how it was shared. To those who are deprived of viable search in organizations Slack is a real treasure.

Most enterprise search provides success in only 4 of 5 attempts (this adds up to being roughly $375 of cost for unproductive / counter productive time per employee per year when looking at it through an extremely conservative lens (others estimate 4 to 10 times this cost per employee per year). Just the value of improved search, as well as bringing information into context and having it searchable ads greater value from moving the dark matter into the searchable light.

Search in Slack is most often better than the enterprise search that people use across their organization. But, it also is often better than the search that is built into various platforms that are used in and across the organization, including enterprise social networks (some exceptions to this include KnoweldgePlaza, which has really good search within it, as that is a large part its purpose). This improvement in search finds what is needed and the search result surfacing the item in context is really special. Slack has also designed this really well, which adds to the ease of use and enjoyment.

Integration and Interoperability (What? Really?)

Another big pain point in organizations is integration and interoperability. There are disparate systems which many people have to pay attention to metrics, messages / alerts, and charts from various services across them, which is not efficient and rarely is there an integrated view (nor a means to interact across different systems from one interface). But, rarely is there a means to search within and across the services to do quick comparisons or easily bring those things into a more unified view. Often IT has the integrations far down on their prioritized to do list or in the "can not be done category" for reasons of feasibility or difficulty. But, one of the beauties of Slack is it integrates with other services relatively easily through a variety of methods (many can be done in a day or two in side-project time), if there is access to an API or even a means to see a screen so it can be parsed for values and meaning. Groups have been able to pull together their own aggregated and searchable views (sometimes in their own channel to view / review and search within or as a system with an identity that chats and shares things out as a bot). The solution that is cobbled together in side-project time to meet the needs of employees meets their jobs to get done and need that access requirements, which make Slack far quite efficient and usable. While IT has their requests slowly (if that) moving through the prioritization process, employees have been able to drastically reduce the pain points that nudge them to consider looking employment opportunities that value their getting work done.

Sane payment models

One of the last, often overlooked, elements goes completely against the trend of "evil" enterprise service payment models of paying for seats (used or unused). This model is loved by nearly all enterprise software vendors (or their boards - somebody has to love it as it surely isn't the customers who know they are being taken for a ride).

Slack treats paying for their software / services differently. It runs on a freemium model, but has high conversion rate to paying customers for its offerings. It is not that paying users get full search of the a complete archive and more plug-ins, but also quite good support (yes there are a few others that give quite good support - though this isn't the norm). The pay model provides improved search powers and interoperability / integration, which being severe pain points in organizations make it worth paying for and the pricing per user makes that a bargain (hey Slack don't go changing the price though).

Yet, what really makes Slack's payment model special and different is you only pay for accounts used that month. (Did I hear a collective "WHAT?") Yes, you don't pay for the number of prospective seats nor tied into long contracts that go beyond the needed time span. Ever try to get a reduction in seats paid for after a few months when you have realized only 60% of the seats paid for are used and that doesn't look like it will shift over the next 18 to 30 months of the life of the lock-in? Slack understands that pain and opted to not partake in that model of pain.

In short Slack reduces pain and increases efficiency and value

So, the reasons why Slack seems to be at the tip of many business and enterprise tongues (as an inquiry or recommendation) is focussing on what is delivered, its ease, and the value people get.

Slack aims at delivering a usable (and friendly) service as a means to communicate to get and share information and knowledge. But, in doing this also knocks out some nasty pains people in organizations really don't like and have long wanted resolved. Slack is basically the un-enterprise solution as it focusses on being easy to use, reduces pain points, and tries to be friendly. Yes, this is software for the enterprise, or for the parts that don't relish pain.

So Slack is perfect and the cure all?

Um, no. Slack is far from perfect. It isn't trying to be everything. So, you are wondering what are the pain points or limitations?

Slack isn't going to scale to meet your hundreds or thousands of employees needs today

Slack works relatively well up to a few hundred people (there are many hundreds using in one installation (instances well over a thousand as well), but that isn't optimal). And even with keeping an installation under a couple hundred people it is still going to be a bit noisy. Many of these installations with more than 100 people in them use the channels for creating smaller groups / teams / projects / targeted conversations.

While improvements are need to get to solid filtering, this does help so important things don't get missed, or conversations that could use a person's input gets their attention when they weren't specifically called out. The ability to move conversations to and between channels (in a manner that leaves a trail behind where the conversation started).

It also needs the ability to more easily tie conversations threads together and tie related discussions together through tags (yes, I said the tags word) [the addition of each entry now having the ability to get emoji responses has been getting used to aggregate related content in some organizations in a "visual tagging" way, but lacks clarity in understanding, even with "what each emoji means" charts]. Also, finding related threads and discussions across channels can be cumbersome in search when different terms (synonyms / fungible technical terms) are being used, even if search is good.

Not everything nor everybody works in the open

In organizations there are viable and valuable reasons to have some things not shared openly. Legal, regulatory, compliance, and some things are best tested and considered among a few people and honed / vetted before sharing more widely and other needs for improving social comfort are often lacking in the enterprise social platforms.

Many mature social platforms for enterprise now offer private spaces for groups to share information, and if it seems viable or gets honed / edited it is shared it out more broadly. Many even follow the social progression of fire model where trends in the messages / sparks and comments are seen as being connected and possibly need more investigation, then moved to or collected in a small comfortable space / campfire to investigate before sharing more broadly / campfire (if it is deemed worthy of moving it forward), and then honed through collaboration and perfected to be put into production / torch.

By the way - Slack does offer the capability of not remembering things for paid users as some organizations require this for compliance. There is a forget quickly, forget in a week or so, and keep everything capability to meet a variety of needs / requirements of organizations [this forgetting negates the incredibly helpful search, but organizations that require this often have bigger troubles that they are dealing with]. But, global forgetting isn't the same as quiet comfortable groups with permeable walls that work well for many people in larger organizations with cultures heavy on the Western European and North American sensibilities.

Slack doesn't replace everything

There have already been some rather poorly considered (mostly through the lack of understanding the diversity and complexity of social - no it isn't simple nor just complicated) "we are going to use Slack to replace..." attempts. Understanding the category / class of tool that Slack falls into is essential. It isn't a replacement for the collective, curation, nor team / group workspaces like Jive and others (yes, there is one service in this category / class that nearly everybody wants to move away from as fast as they can, but Slack isn't the tool to move to as a replacement). Slack does well to sit alongside those services for conversational interactions and sharing results out of them. It isn't going to replace a social search and collective aggregation service like KnowledgePlaza. Slack not only integrates things into itself, but also can have what is in it as fodder to integrate out, so conversations and things shared in Slack can be honed and more deeply framed and considered in other services and then have results and outcomes of those considerations shared back into Slack.

Slack is not going to replace your document management service. It is a good partner for it to add context and easily drop documents that are relevant from the service into Slack. But, Slack isn't going to replace document management, even if its search is good, the versioning, permissions, and access controls for compliance and other valid needs aren't there in Slack. Your document management service could become more pleasurable to use though.

Enterprise is a complicated beast

Having worked in and around social software for enterprise for about 20 years now, it is a wicked space. There are a lot of "needs" that Slack doesn't comply with yet. There are a lot of issues that aren't on Slack's horizon yet, it may not want to place them there.

Enterprise also brings with it a diversity of needs, mental models inside, use cases, workflow models, and more that should be and could be addressed, but Slack isn't there yet. I'm not sure Slack even has all of them fully on their radar - many organizations don't centrally have them on their radar yet either. But needs arise when divisions and groups underserved by centrally chosen tools in an organization that doesn't fit their needs. When this happens groups often will go in search of services and tools that meet their needs to help them get the job done.

Working with enterprise means working with organizations that don't understand how they themselves actually work nor operate in workflows nor knowledge flows. Many social platforms aren't in the business to help organizations understand their needs, problems, pain points, and gaps yet these are the first steps to understanding the right fit for tools. Analysts, for the most part, aren't in this business, nor are most consultants (selling solutions based cookie cutter decision models makes more profit than the deep understanding the problems before considering solutions model). Perhaps Slack could embrace this model of helping organizations understand themselves, as they aren't focussed on "winning" as much as helping solve problems and address needs (another reason Slack stands out and has a good helpful product).

So what should you do?

The first step is to take Slack seriously. It is doing a lot of things really well, as well as weekly and monthly iterations making things even better.

Also understand not only what Slack is, but what it isn't. Understand how your organizations works (if you need help with that reach out to me, as helping organizations see clearly through the fog of complexity is what I do) and sort out how a service that focusses on reducing pain points and increases people's ability to get things done can fit.

Second, start early thinking about filtering to cut through the noise for alerts and reducing "noise". Work out a community guide and plan. Also, sort out the flow models that can work well with the other services in the organization.

Running Podular Teams

Running Podular Teams

One of the things that has brought happiness from the Connected Company book being out for nearly three years (now in paperback), is getting the idea of podular teams and organization out there for a wider understanding. From 2001 onward I ran my product and project teams in a podular manner. Since then I have helped many organizations I have worked with as clients adopt this approach so to be more nimble, efficient, productive, and keeps the teams members happy as well as management.

This works well where there are a diversity of projects that have different cycles that need different skills for a duration, or are short to mid-range in length (less than 6 to 9 months). This does work well for longer projects as it helps with staffing when their is any turnover in the pod.

What is Podular?

When I started running my teams I had a fixed set of people working under me in my program area and a wider set of projects. The team members had a wide variety of skills and various depths of strength and experience in those skills. The simple overview is, to stay on top of my team and project needs I set up a simple spreadsheet with the names of team members on the horizontal rows and skills running along the top of the columns. In each cell I put a 1 to 5 ranking (5 being the highest) for that person’s skill and expertise level. To build a project team I would assess the skill needs of the project and the project timeline and review the program’s team to right fit a team to each project.

Other program managers and my upper management called this matrixed team management, but outside of this the term matrixed organizations had a very different meaning. When working with Dave Gray on the Connected Company book he brought up the conflict with the term matrix (matrixed organizations were in the “bad thing cycle”) and started calling them podular teams, which worked well as that is how they functioned, as a self-sustained pod.

The teams when set up could mostly run themselves autonomously, mostly because of the people I had in the program team. But, often there was a person senior enough that could keep an eye on how things were progressing. If things were not running well I would get a heads up as a manager and help sort out a solution. Many times I was on the team, not as a manager, but taking one of the roles that needed depth of a skill set for a duration.

How to Set It Up

Setting up podular teams can be done in a spread sheet, but a couple times I have built quick web applications to serve the purpose. The assessment of skills (all of them) is essential. This can be through professional assessments, team review by peers, and / or a managers assessment. Keep in mind that over time the skills ratings will change. It is best not to work off of job descriptions as those are most often very off target. It can be good to sit with each person and run their assessment by them. Keeping to a 1 to 5 rating makes the reviewing with people a little easier. Don’t assess the top rating for a skill based on their being the best in the pool of talent as there may be a need for somebody with deeper skill and experience at some point.

When you have the individuals rated on their skills and you are sure you have all the skills listed (keeping to relatively broad categories can be helpful) it is good to color code the ratings and look to make it easier to see the gaps or potentially thin areas in the pool.

Next take a couple projects that are have been running and map the people to the the team and look at what sort of skills are needed. Look at the make-up of the teams as well as the pool of candidates. Look at where there may be weaknesses in the pods at times based on cyclical needs. You may find that there is two days of work for a skill at a level 5 each quarter, so starting to map the pod over various durations of time is helpful, from weeks, months, and quarters.

Next Steps

There are a few of things that running a podular team environment needs that make it a little more complicated. The first is maturity cycles of a project. Projects have three distinct stages: 1) Creation; 2) Iteration; and 3) Maintenance. Initially when I added this I kept it as a column in the spreadsheet for each person, but I found it really applies to each skill. The skills and capability to fit into the stages is essential as each stages takes very different mindsets and approaches, as well as personality type / temperament to handle that stage well. Shifting somebody with a “4” skill rank that has only done maintenance to a creation stage role is often a quick way to start trigger problems in the pod on a project.

The second is growing skills. One of the things that quickly jumps out when running teams in podular environments is overlap of skills, as well as gaps at various levels. Another thing over time is the skill levels for individuals change, which changes the make-up of the podular teams and the pool of people over time. I started keeping a second sub-column in each ranking to track this change over time. At one point I turned the second column into the individual’s goal column, which was set during formal reviews and casual reviews to learn what the skills that person had a desire in improving. Eventually, this turned into a third column and I brought back the rating change column. This meant I had a “Last Review”, “Current”, and “Goal” column for each person’s skill ranking. The “Goal” column really helped with setting podular teams to take somebody with a high skill ranking and pair them with someone wanting to improve their skills in that area. The person there to shadow and get some hands on experience form someone with more skill and experience nearly always was in that pod because of some skill they had a skill match for on that project.

Tracking things in this way also means traditional reviews are relatively easy to do as progress can be tracked as well as contributions. In working with other organizations, those that have team members providing feedback across a project makes review and assessment easier as well.

The third is hiring into the pool. Running any group over time leads to hiring people. This can be to replace somebody who is leaving or for newly created roles / positions. Running things in a podular manner and keeping track of projects, pods, people, and their skills means there is a really good view into what skills are needed at what level to fill that new opening. With monitoring people’s growing skills (as well as atrophy) looking at a pool of people, their skills, and the needs on projects means seeing the needs of the new hire is rather clear. This can be difficult in organizations with strict job descriptions and roles that are only updated every two to five years. But, most often it means the role is easy to write and right fill, if skill levels and other fit can be determined well.

Building Pods

When the framework is set the next is taking projects and teams and converting them to pods. The big shift is going to be the pods most likely are going to be a little more fluid than they were prior, so to match changing skill needs over the life cycle of a project or team needs at various points. Turning them into pods often means these pods will run a little more autonomously over time.

This means the role of the person managing, if they are are not a contributing member at all, is going to change. Their role is going to be less managing what happens in the pod and focussing on clearing the way for the people in the pods to do their work. The manager will openly check with the project owner as well as those in the pod to ensure things are running smoothly and assess upcoming needs or smooth out any bumps that arise. Often the number of people and projects that are being managed will rise. The manager is often the person who will work to help get resources and answers to needs as they arise. The manager is also the one keeping an eye on budgets and burn rates, which becomes essential when bringing people in and out of the pod to get the best skills mix as needed.

The pods will need a really good platform for team communication, coordination, and collaboration. This needs to be open to the person managing as well as fully open to people that drop into the pod to fill in roles. Email doesn’t work as a part of podular environments. Getting a tool that works well can be a less than easy task, but it is an important task to ensure the right fit. The client or project owner may or may not have full access to the tool, but a good view into progress, deliverables, needs, and probability of completion is a good view to offer.

Putting a pod together can be done in a self-selected manner, in a curated approach, or one that is mixed. While many organizations find success with self-selection, where the pod has the opportunity to self assemble, the downside is this only works with some skill sets, personality types, and work environments. Where self selection really falls flat, if not fails spectacularly is skills that are often strong with people who are introverts and needing those skills in the pod. In many organizations this can be more than 70 percent of the teams and pods that are needed to be assembled. Self-selection also tends to favor those who have working knowledge of others, which makes new hires and others that don’t have experience in the pool on the outside, with pods often choosing a known, but poor fit, rather than a better fit that is unknown. The upside of self-selection is pods get built with people who tend to work well together.

The curated approach where a manager or pod builder works to assemble a pod with the right skills, levels, and availability. The availability is often tricky and can take some negotiation to get a key role filled with the right person for a duration that is needed. The curation approach mixed with some self-selection can work well also, and is often a really good way to do things over time.

Really Understanding Needs

The biggest hurdle to this is deeply understanding needs. This is understanding all the roles needed and skills. One thing that becomes quickly clear is there are often skills needed beyond what traditionally has been considered. With podular environments the ability to bring in people with skills that fill these gaps becomes second hand and seems natural. This leads to the pod looking to optimize their output and try to understand things that are less than optimal. This short fall in skills and gap in skills continually arises when implementing and deploying social / collaboration / communication platforms in organizations as there are 14 essential roles needed and most are trying to cover it with 2 or three of these skills roles.

Over time the skills needed in the pods becomes clearer, but often bringing in a consultant with experience in podular environments and the domain areas becomes a huge time saver to get things running smoothly early in this transition.

Shift Happened - Part 1: More Productive Not Using Productivity Tools

Over the past six months or so, I’ve been increasingly hearing from IT leaders in organizations who have been surprised by a shift in how people work digitally. The work patterns related to this shift are far from new and, in fact, are well over a decade old.

Nonetheless, some have been surprised by who, why, and how broadly and rapidly the change is happening. Those caught by surprise are often in IT departments, and they are surprised by the changing work patterns of sales, teleworkers, and others in the field and away from the office. Looking at these shifts in detail, how those who are surprised by these shifts came to be surprised isn’t so surprising.

Productivity Happened

Over the past 3 to 4 years, there has been a shift in how people work. Advancements in mobile devices and applications is part of it, but the prevalence of touch tablets has been a large contributor to the change. The light weight and ability use them for much of users’ daily work makes tablets a relatively good choice for those working on the road or away from the office. Initially, many thought that not having Microsoft Office was going to be a hinderance for tablet use, but that has not been the case.

But, the same time touch tablets were becoming a largely viable option, how and where information and knowledge work was happening shifted too. Work was increasingly happening in online services where text and data was entered into an online service, often one with collaborative or social functionality. The daily report was no longer a document completed in Word and then uploaded; it is now text that is entered in a service that connects colleagues and team members who do follow-on work with that input. The conversations happens around the information and the content shared initially can be edited, commented on, and linked to externally.

Those in the field may not be online all the time, but they are collecting notes and information throughout their day, often doing so in small, lightweight, text-focused apps. The small writing apps often have Markdown as their means to add structure (structure replaced style), including headers, bold, italics, bullets, links (to web pages, online spreadsheets, images, or other). Markdown isn’t new and many of the online services people are using have handled Markdown text for years. Up to this point, Markdown had mostly been in the geek domain, but now sales folks, admins, field workers, and other traditionally non-tech-centric workers are using it as well.

Frequent users say that the 6 to 8 regular Markdown annotations (such as heading levels, bold, italics, links, and pull quotes) were quick and easy to learn. MS Word has nearly 200 functions in its ribbons these days, but many people use only 15 to 20 of those, and most often use 6 to 10, for which they use keystrokes. Yes, the common 6 to 10 most used and easily found Word functions map to those provided within Markdown. Many text apps have buttons for Markdown for user convenience.

This shift to simplified text focus (that doesn’t require Microsoft Word) has delivered quite a few benefits. The first is that it is incredibly easy to share contents and files with anybody, as there are no “I have the wrong version of Word” or “I copied it into my document and my document is now a mess” problems. The files sizes are also lightweight and easy to email or upload, even in environments with network bandwidth constraints. Most of their work is going to be copied into text boxes in an online system anyway, or, if folks are working in a Word Document, it will likely be parsed and turned into plain text, rich text, or HTML (things Markdown-related tools easily output as alternate options).

But, of all these small benefits, the largest is the increase in productivity. Many of those working in this manner, mostly because they were on devices that didn’t have Microsoft Word, found they were “far more productive outside their old productivity tools.” Nearly every person I have talked with who has watched this shift happen has uttered this statement or something very similar about productivity. Workers are no longer battling their tools (Office / Word), but are simply producing.

Shift Sneaks Up When You are Headsdown Building Past Models

Without exception, every person in IT who has tracked me down to have this discussion (with the aim of finding out if they are alone and how to start thinking about it), is coming out of a very long SharePoint implementation. They were heads down on their (initially) 2 to 4 month Sharepoint project, that ended up being an order of magnitude longer, more expensive, and larger in scale and scope than expected, so they didn’t see this shift happening.

Often, these folks in IT were pointed in my direction by someone in a different division within the organization who I talked with or worked with on collaborative and social working projects to support their needs. These systems and services provide the text boxes into which their workers were pasting text from their tablet text-writing apps. Their work and work models shifted drastically while IT was heavily focused on a solution that wasn’t solving needs for large portions of the organization.

IT really wasn’t aware of this shift until they went to renew their Microsoft Office licenses and were being moved to Office 365, which seemed like it was going to meet the online working needs of the systems they had been asked to deliver years back. What IT was not expecting was that 25% to 40% (or, as I have been hearing over the past couple weeks, 60%) of their workers, many of whom are working out in the field or virtually, refuse to go back to using Office (often voicing this refusal loudly and strongly). IT found they had paid for seats that wouldn’t be used, an incredibly expensive proposition. Office 365 can be justifiable to many when it is being used, but to sit unused is another story. The senior IT folks have been saying their percentage of workers shifting to this new (Office-free) model is going up by 2% each month, as means of working more easily and efficiently in other ways spreads (e.g. 25% in April 2013 to 27% in May 2013).

More Productive Not Using Productivity Tools

This big shift relates to the fact that traditional productivity tools weren’t based on efficient productivity. Most standard productivity tools grew from a paper-based model and world moved to the digital world. As work has largely changed from passing documents around to posting and working on content in more open collaborative and group environments that align with what our modern work has became, the model of a “doc” disappeared. The document as an object was the focus of the “system of record,” but now, in a “systems of engagement” model, focus is on the milestones met and status marker activities in the online collaborative, collective, and team (including group / community / network) interaction systems.

Tools that got in the way of productivity and didn’t meet needs as people began to work more interactively in digital-focused and digital-appropriate environments are no longer the default tools of choice. We are working a little more like humans interact naturally and having technology adapt to these ways of working, rather than making humans learn a lot about how to adapt to traditional technology to do their work.

---

Shift Happened Series

• Part 1: More Productive Not Using Productivity Tools
• Part 2: Small Apps Loosely Joined
  
• Part 3: Capturing Decisions in Social
• Part 4: The One Social Way (Or not) to Doing Social Really Well in Enterprise

Alexander Howard Interview with Christopher (moot) Poole from October 2011 Transcript

Alexander Howard Interviews Christopher Poole (Moot from 4Chan) at Web 2.0 Summit in 2011 (October 18, 2011)

The video interview is at YouTube Christopher Poole Interviewed at Web 2.0 Summit 2011

4Chan is 8 years old and Christopher founded it when he was 15 years old.

Transcript of the core conversation:

Alex Howard: ... What have you learned along the way?

Christopher Poole: I think that I've learned more about what not to do than what to do. Because, 4Chan itself is modeled after this other community, it is modeled after this Japanese website community called Futaba Channel and when I was younger I watched a lot of anime and found Futaba and though this is fantastic and nothing like this exists for English speakers and Western culture. So I translated it and hosted it. A lot of its success has come from the fact that it was very different at the time and was this image based form of communication that wasn't quite popular in the U.S. and elsewhere. It has grown steadily and organically over all these years. There has been a lot of work put into it, like creating a homepage, doing news posts, recruiting volunteers, creating a ruleset, adding new boards, and trying to guide it. But, it was something that has grown as a natural process over the years.

I think that I've deserved more credit for not making mistakes and pulling a Facebook and pissing everybody off, like clockwork. I've done things that have upset people and there are times there are things that people didn't agree with. But, it is more about how do you try the happy medium than going to the extremes, that was part of my talk today as part of the message.

AH: The thing with Facebook is the users are upset, but the users aren't leaving, from what we can tell. What is going on there?

CP: I think it is lack of alternatives. It is very hard to migrate off of Facebook as that is where your [social] graph is. Frankly, for a lot of people for a lot of uses it is a good product. I use Facebook and 800 million users use Facebook. It is just that it is not great at everything and they are sometimes insensitive to these decisions they have made. Part of it is educational, as users will act negatively to things they don't understand, like the profile changes a couple months a to and people acted really negatively to it, but really nothing much had changed. They just needed to do a better job of communicating what those changes were. But, it is hard to leave, like any walled garden.

AH: Right. The costs of leaving become bigger and bigger as more people join.

Facebook has a "real names policy" in theory, in practice there is some wiggle here and there, but that is the standard. With Google+ there has been quite a lot of controversy around that famous "nim wars" online. What's the role and importance of anonymity online? Should that be held up as an important thing for communities, as they become created, to keep or countries to protect?

CP: It is absolutely important. It is more important as a contrast to [real names]. People paint this in black and white, when it really isn't. Nothing should be no one right way of doing anything. I think most people view anonymity as a natural opposite to something like a Facebook identity. With Plus I think Google really missed this opportunity to really innovate in a way that Facebook hasn't, and to support this idea that you are many people. I mean, Christopher Poole with a face is different than Christopher Poole without a little picture. Which is different than a Chris, than a Moot. We are all different people based on the context where we are faced. We are different people in front of different audiences. Google could have used that opportunity to support this fluid identity.

One of the things I talk about is this prismatic identity, that you are multi-faceted. You are not just who you are sharing with, it is who you are sharing as. It is really a piece of you is changing and people are seeing a different face of you. Google could have done a better job of "that is totally it, let's run with that". Instead they deleted accounts without real names. They don't even let you pick a vanity URL or user names. It is even worse than Facebook is, in that sense.

AH: So, constant back and forths in the media community is whether you need to have someone's real name to have a good community on a site. Is community about having real names on the Internet? Or is it something more?

CP: No, because identity is not real names. It is about having an identity or having some amount of accountability within a community. You can even have accountability in an anonymous community. I mean 4Chan is the most accountable place on the web, because if you are an outsider there are no structural barriers to using 4Chan, you can come in, enter it, and use it - and yet you can't. In lieu of these structural barriers the community has erected these socio-cultural barriers to understand the community, to understand the language, and how to act on the site. If you are a new user and you post, there is this is this concept of "lurk more", people will identify that immediately, and will reject you and will be like "you need to lurk more" and you need to understand more before you try to be one of us. So again you don't need a full name and a registration date for someone to say this person is new and needs to lurk more, they can tell by the way you interact. You can have accountability in anonymous communities and you don't need a real full name. Most people try to draw this as anecdotal evidence that is drawn from YouTube comments, that have been historically pretty horrible in the things that people say. But then again they have a user name that is persistent across YouTube as a service and that YouTube name is now linked to a Google address. So clearly they are very accountable to having a person identity to Google, and yet for what ever reason people choose to feel like they can be total jerks on YouTube. I think that has more again to do with the community, because that community has been accepting of that. There are many communities that are the ones you see the bad comments and they don't seem to discourage this the way you see on other sites. So, it is not a one to one relationship between a real name and an identity.

AH: When you look forward to this future of other people trying to create communities or trying to fix the ones they have, what are the things they should not do?

CP: I think to try and prescribe that there is this one you. That is Facebook's version of the world, that there is one you, and who you are online is who you are offline. An example I used earlier was, Google and Facebook think of you as a mirror and that you have one reflection. That reflection you see in that mirror is the one everybody else sees. Again, not true. People are multi-faceted, people are more like diamonds. You can look at a person or a diamond from any angle and see something different, and yet it is still the same.

I would encourage them to think about, it is not just about anonymity versus full names. Encourage them to think about choice is not necessarily a bad thing, giving your users the options to choose how they are identified on the service is something that you want to do. Again, you can incorporate something like Facebook Connect to use it to authenticate a user, to ensure they are not a troll or a spambot. But, just because you are using Facebook Connect doesn't then require that you post with a full name and a profile photo. I think being very aware of the fact that as humans identity is a complex concept and to allow that flexibility in a web product.

AH: So, last question. When another site on the internet, whether it happens to be a person, a blog, a media site, or whatever happens to invoke the wrath of 4Chan, they can sometimes receive a great deal of traffic or sometimes or more difficult attacks. Right? When I say attack I mean only in the technical sense, there are some technically able people that are part of your community.

To what extent can you look ahead to the way the web is evolving and shape that conversation with the amorphous group of people when something happens that the offline world doesn't understand, when there is a great deal of focus put upon another website. Is it the fault of the website owner or is it the community? How should we understand what is happening?

CP: This mob mentality or groupthink is something that has existed for hundreds and hundreds of years. You look at any war basically, particularly one motivated by religion. People are able to get riled up in mass quantities, given the right kind of spark.

I think now more than ever, it is not just 4Chan it is this group Anonymous that when you trace back is now something very separate from 4Chan, it is really its own distinct thing. Now more than ever we see it in the news we hear about it every day. It is not just then, we hear about Occupy Wall Street, that was a lot of different groups that came together. Now we are seeing this mobilization of online forces, not only online but also offline. That change happened so rapidly over the course of the past three years that we are still trying to come to terms with that.

The future of groups is so unpredictable. That is why with 4Chan I have felt that I am no more than the shepherd. I am the guy who only has a certain... I am at the wheel but I don't control the wind. Given the wind I can only have limited control over the direction of the site. I've always tried to maintain it as something where it had a very basic set of rules and believing there was this invisible hand, John Locke style of community moderation, where we can do some kinds of basic things and set some basic boundaries. But, more or less, it needs to come from the community itself. The community at some point needs to self regulate.

AH: Any principles for self regulation that exist come out of 4Chan?

CP: There are some basic rule, like don't be totally crazy and break the law. [chuckles] We are still figuring that one out.

AH: Okay. I think we are all still figuring this one out as we move forward.

Mistaking the Edges for the Norm

One of the best lessons from social quantitative analysis in grad school (public policy) was learning to understand if you are viewing edge cases or the norm (mainstream). Humans have some common traits, but when you start to design or develop any sort of program (be it government services or social software) you start to realize that social at scale has many variations to how humans are social.

When taking that deep understanding we must understand if the trends we are seeing are the edges (or even outliers) or the norm. The common elements that cause the variation (often very large variations) are often driven by culture (as well as sub-cultures) and personality types.

Many of us who were early to blogging and many other social platforms were very much outliers and at or beyond the edges. We built and designed tools and services based on our personality types and traits. When you have 1.5 billion people the internet getting 70 million or even 200 million people that are similar to the edge case traits can be somewhat easy. What is really difficult is that next 90 percent. Keep in mind people use social tools very differently. What has worked for the very early innovators through early adopters is extremely different from the different personality types that will follow.

This gap in understanding that the world is not like us has not become real to many building social tools. But, to some it has hit hard, very hard. Much of the early Web 2.0 theories about social web patterns were looking at the edges and mistaking them for the norm. This was relatively easy to see if you have a background in social analytics and adoption trending through a society at scale.

To get beyond the edges you have to go deep, very much like danah boyd has done with her work. The work danah has done is deeply helpful as it surfaces the difference in understanding across personality types, age ranges, and many cultural influences. She deeply understood the problem that most people on line (youth and adults) were not openly social as was (and sadly still is) the common assumptions of things to come. Privacy and small groups is much more common. Today we see Facebook privacy setting with 70% or more with “Friends Only” or tighter for sharing information ([Pew’s Privacy management on social media sites” report).

Gamification

This understanding the edges and norms differences is also incredibly helpful for things like gamification, which can cause really nice upticks in usage of social services with the innovator and early adopter types (in the Technology Adoption Lifecycle, that is the core of Geoffrey Moore’s Crossing the Chasm framing). But, for the rest of the users it is either non-influencial or is deeply problematic. The mix of benefit and loss is essential to understand. At IA Summit I had quite a few discussions with UX people trying to fix the communities that were damaged by gamification in the long run after a nice initial uptick. It is a tough problem and a real issue to grapple with. This is incredibly noticeable on inside the firewall communities as there is a fixed user base and you can easily see who participated and how over time and the shifts (well, you do need access to the data, which some vendors don’t provide access to).

Today many of the one year to four year old social software deployments in organizations have gone through the edge types and been finding gaps in their services and tools offered as they work to get to the norm types.

The tools must change and adapt to the edges and the norms and the two user sets don’t really work in the same way. We have a lot of seeing, thinking, understanding, and building a better path for the mainstream folks as we bring people along on this fantastic transformation those of us on the edges have been through the last 20 years and more.

Related:

• Cooperation, Coordination, and Competition

Microsoft and Yammer?

Yesterday's news of the rumor that Microsoft is about to purchase Yammer surfaced and Bloomberg was able to get confirmations there were talks happening. This one seemed a little odd last evening as the rumor broke, but then the ambient signals that myself and others had been seeing with Yammer made sense in that light. Companies start acting differently, often quite off the norm, and don’t really explain why. Yammer has had that in spades lately. The other reasons besides being bought are: IPO; workforce needs (turn over, need to hire, massive wave of new hires, etc.); or large new customer(s) taking a lot of focus.

Does the Purchase Makes Sense

Talking with others who live and breath in this space, Microsoft buying Yammer wasn’t the first company many of us had on our potentials list. Microsoft has had a difficult time with Sharepoint social components (a similar problem to Oracle’s social offerings) in that the bolt together social elements take a lot of understanding and depth to get right and there is much more than bolting things together. Any company purchasing Sharepoint in the last 18 months to 2 years that has done their due diligence knows they need to find something better for the social software components than what Sharepoint offers. Too many dead ends, too much of it isn’t used.

For inside the organization there are many great options that are much easier to put into place than the social Sharepoint components, and they all plug into Sharepoint nicely. Sorting out which of the options takes a lot of understanding and depth, much of it missing from the consulting and analyst space as it is the nuances that make huge differences.

Vendors the past 4 to 5 years in the social business / Enterprise 2.0 space have had a relatively easy time selling against Sharepoint. In the last couple years social business service/platform vendors saw a shift. Sharepoint was not whom they were competing against, as it wasn’t being taken seriously by buyers who did their homework. The platform they were hands down pitching their services against and most often winning agianst was Yammer.

Yammer with its freemium model has made huge inroads, mostly through the back door. Most companies were slow to provide a good offerings and are still not providing authorized services for internal uses to their employees. This slow approach is easy to fix, just set up Yammer and you are off and running, which is great for employees, but a huge liability if it isn’t owned by the organization.

Yammer has serious traction with its claimed 200,000 companies using it (well, people in those companies using it). Yammer claims 3 million paid customers, which while a great sum for revenues, when measured against 200,000 and estimating 100 people in each company (a conservative average) you get 20 million people and only 3 million have licenses. Not an impressive conversion rate, and the multiplier is conservative. This is tough to take to Wall Street to go IPO with.

How on target is the conversion rate? When the competing vendors, nearly hands down, mention Yammer as their top competitor and they can win most of the head-to-head customers in that match-up, there is a conversion problem. Yammer shows the need, sells the value, but there are gaps in their offerings that cause them to not convert. In talking to customers who have been through that process the reasons are diverse, which make it difficult to close those gaps. The common two reasons mentioned are: 1) The value of what is paid for and what is given away for free; and 2) Some of the components are a bit buggy or don’t perfectly fit the needs.

Yammer use educates the customers for free and helped them identify needs and gaps they need to focus on when getting down to purchasing. This is a downside of large freemium models. The customers gain understanding and think, “Yes, this is good, but we want better in these areas.”

So, Microsoft and Yammer?

Microsoft has a large problematic gap to fill with Sharepoint in the social slice of their offering (Sharepoint does many things well, social is not something that fits that description other than Team Sites, but groupware for teams has been honed and iterated for 20 years, they should get that right). Yammer does the social software slice rather well, but has issues with conversion to paid customers. Microsoft is a selling machine, particularly with Sharepoint.

This sounds like a match that makes more sense. I still don’t think Yammer is the optimal fit for Sharepoint. Services like Newsgator for inside the firewall is usually a first stop for organizations needing social that works and can be deployed far more easily. I hear customers often say Microsoft suggested they use Newsgator or give it a shot.

What Impact to Other Vendors?

Many vendors should be just fine with this Yammer and Microsoft marriage if it happens. The ones with trouble would be the one’s who focus on the Sharepoint ecosystem and live off it, like Newsgator and Telligent (a more outside the org social platform strength than inside).

Other vendors that don’t rely on Sharepoint but integrate still will likely keep winning business and have very happy customers. Social is very broad and while most analysts and consultants look at features and checking them off, that is only a small slice of what to look for to get success with a service or tool. The interaction design, how it works with mobile, how easily does it integrate with other services, and many other considerations are where the key differentiation comes from.

I know many organizations with very successful social software offerings for their employees with relatively high use rates of the services, but they are using 2 or 3 different platforms that various segments of their organization use. Different cultures and personality types in the organization drift to certain offerings and not others. Organizations who are moving to the “one solution” model really struggle. Yes, there are downsides like getting everybody talking, but there are ways around that as well.

The common story I’ve heard the last couple years is the organization is going to standardize their social offering to employees on Sharepoint. The organization also had 5 to 15% of their people using an unauthorized Yammer instance. Once Sharepoint social components were rolled out they weren’t that usable and employees pointed to the much more usable Yammer and in 2 months the Yammer use doubled. Nearly all the companies know at this point they need to find a better option than Sharepoint. Now we may have Yammer and Sharepoint under one roof, or maybe not (still in talks).

Related:

• Microsoft and the Plan for Yammer?

Beyond Simple Social Presentation

We have been here before.

Where we are with social tools in organizations has been done before and not overly well. But, where we are today is a place we have been twice before in my working career. We had groupware and knowledge management tools in this same spot. Similar promise and similar success both right here.

Where are we?

We are at the inflection point in social software where we need to get beyond the simple social mindset. The groupware and knowledge management waves of social software were damaged at this same point and lost. There are many reasons for this, but one of the biggest issues and one we are facing now is the ever difficult task of designing tools that embrace how complicated and complex social interactions are with humans as social beings and how that gets more complicated and complex as it scales.

On May 30th (2012) I gave an updated version of my Beyond Simple Social talk at a Salesforce.com sponsored UX Lecture Series (slides down below and Uday Gajendar's great live blog of the talk). The talk sold out quickly and was filled with not only Salesforce.com UX people, but people from other vendors and companies and it was user experience people, product managers, engineers, and customers managing various platforms and services. One thing that seems to have been the common thread is the how do we build social tools to broader user base and that meet that easy to use interface on top of ever increasing complicated and complex systems and services.

This simplicity in the interface is the great advantage the current wave of social software has had, the tools mostly get out of the way, or far more so than in the past. The tools are usable and relatively easy to use, up to a point.

What the talk focusses on is seeing the breadth, depth, and interwoven complexities of the social elements that each have depth and their own focal points as distinct items or lenses. The talk uses the getting beyond simple social as a gateway to the 40+ social lenses I have been building upon and use in my work with customers of social tools as well as vendors to help optimize the use and experience of the tools to meet needs and help remove hinderances to use.

The last six to nine months the group of people in roles I see most often running into the short falls of social tools in organizations are those in UX roles (interaction design, information architecture, usability, user interface design, and the rare social interaction designers). Why? They are the ones that get called upon to fix the tools or service as there are many complaints it is unusable. They are the ones whose pants catch on fire when things do not go as expected. They are the ones who get called in to “make it work”, but often they can only do so much with a tool or service that was not a good match or was bolt together solution bought under the premise it can be assembled to do everything. If you want to find the reality of how things work, find the UX people to see how gamification is working (or most often has made a mess of formerly functional communities in organizations), various tools are capable of being made usable, which services are easy to optimize for use, and how adaptable a service is across an organization with a broad collection of user types.

But, it is also the UX folks and those whom they report to that are finding what is needed to think through social software problems is not robust enough nor flexible enough to help them see the problems and work through them. The social understandings and complexities are often missing from their toolsets and rarely exist anywhere else in the organization, unless it is a firm with social science chops in-house for some reason.

As a whole the industry around these social tools needs to understand it is at a precipice (some organizations and vendors grasp this really well) of this first stage of social that previous waves have not been able to get beyond. But, once understanding where we are the real work, the freaking hard work begins and we need to be able to see differently, more focussed than we have in the past, and be able to intermix these focussed views to understand what we are really dealing with so we can make it to stage two, three, four, and beyond.

This is the reasoning I have been focusing on the social lenses and those using some of them has been able to see differently and beyond the problems to solutions to try and iterate or more to others. Seeing Dave Gray’s Connected Company book progress helps me know there is value, as he is the only person to have gone through the full set of social lenses, to which the connected company was part of the outcome.

Dave Gray’s writing around Connected Company and JP Rangaswami’s writings on this blog (particularly lately again) about the new collaboration are fantastic and are on their way to happening. Yet, we need to ensure the tools and services that enable them are there and usable for all.

Related Posts

• Urban Planning to Social Business: Social that Scales

• Getting Beyond Simple Social

• Social Scaling and Maturity

Beyond Simple Social - Presented at Salesforce

View more

presentations

from

Thomas Vander Wal

Presenting "Beyond Simple Social" In SF May 30th

I am presenting "Beyond Simple Social" at Salesforce in San Francisco on Wednesday, May 30. Please join us - Eventbright free ticket.

Interfaces for social software are simple. But designing, developing and managing social platforms is not.

I will present some of the lenses he uses to help companies increase user adoption and engagement by better understanding the complexities around social software.

Urban Planning to Social Business: Social that Scales

Overview

In November of 2011 Gordon Ross and I presented What Urban Planning Can Teach Us About Social Business Design at the Enterprise 2.0 Conference in Santa Clara (the presentation is loaded at the end of this post). I was excited about the presentation as it was a great opportunity to place the foundations of understanding social at scale into the Enterprise 2.0 / social business community (Stewart Mader and I have done this in the past as part of the One Year Club presentations).

A background of a masters in public policy 16 plus years ago gave me a great foundation for understanding social at scale through analytics and analysis, but also it primed me for all the “for fun” reading I did after graduation in urban planning and taking it to nice depths that professional tomes offered to get solid understandings. In 2004 I met up with a small group of designers and developers who were swimming in the flow of social software and found one of the very common traits across the group was many years of reading the same urban planning, urban theory, and and architecture books, which gave them a leg up on understanding how humans interact at scale. Until that point I hadn’t drawn the line connecting urban planning and the designing, developing and managing collaboration and social software services beginning in 1996. The presentation begins to tap into that understanding and where has grown to.

Gordon's did a great job with a write-up of his portion of the presentation, in his ThoughtFarmer blog post E2Conf Santa Clara 2011 – What Urban Planning Can Teach Social Business Design. This is my portion of the write-up, or the a part of the slides from 53 to 72. I’ve written before about Social Scaling and Maturity as well as Dave Snowden's Complexity Framework Cynefin, so I am starting beyond those related portions I haven't written about before.

Social Scaling

When considering social systems of any type it is important to understand what scale of social system you are dealing with. There are many decades of studying human social interactions at various scales and most of this focus has been using the lens of the city. Social software scaling and maturity captures a high level view of how it progresses, but this was influenced in part by how human settlements grow and their traits. The progression takes from small settlements with a few people, families, and businesses or farms labelled hamlets, up through villages, towns, and to cities.

Hamlets

Hamlets are small clusters of people in a location. The order of interactions between people is driven by need for protection, human social interactions, sharing or pooling resources, and common connections to the world that is farther away. There is little central infrastructure to begin with other than some paths that have emerged through use, likely a common natural resource that is shared (water, food source, etc.), and often a central place to meet (even if it is somebody's barn or other shelter large enough to have this collection of people to gather. The leaderships is most often ad hoc and is a person whom is comfortable gathering people, asking questions, and resolving issues.

In hamlets everybody knows everybody else very well. There is no hiding and what one person does may impact others directly. Social interactions are all rather simple.

Villages

The village is a larger collection of people gathered in a place. Villages have some infrastructure developing for roads, sanitation, distribution of resources (water, food, etc.), and often have a designated meeting place that is set aside for that purpose. There is a more formalized leadership framework, sometimes just by name but often by roles performed as well, whom people turn to for protection, resolving differences, and helping with making decisions about infrastructure related needs. Most people know of each other, but may not know everybody well.

This familiarity often keeps the common social model focussed on cooperation to get things done at the village wide scale. Often things can still be serendipitous as word of mouth networks still function well. Often the social interactions are still simple, but they are moving to being complicated.

Towns

Towns are the next step up in scale for human settlements. Towns have grown far beyond the first hamlet and have infrastructure needs that have become formalized and have the need for people to have roles related to servicing those infrastructure needs. Infrastructure for the town’s own needs may include: Roads; Sanitation; Health; Schooling; Protective services (fire and policing); Communication; Zoning and planning; etc. There is a formal central leadership role that has its own support system as well as responsibility to ensure the other infrastructure and support roles are functioning well.

The human social interactions have grown beyond the ability to know everybody. There is often a common central communication function that is central to the town for news. The ability to find others who can provide services or help is more difficult and word of networks do not work optimally to find resources and often do not work reliably at all. The ideal of cooperation is not longer the only social interaction model as competition and variations between cooperation and competition are in existence as commerce and friendly rivalries are used to optimize services and goods provided. These variations of governance, civic interaction, and social philosophies all move beyond the ability to function on the simple cooperation model.

The social model is complicated in that it takes a mix of cooperation and coordination for changes, but also to keep things running well.

Cities

Cities are the largest scale for local human settlements (there are megacities and other variations of scale beyond, but the differences are not as large as these and start getting into massive complexity and interdependencies). Cities require common infrastructure that is rather well maintained (well-maintained varies wildly depending where you are in the globe). Not only do cities have all of the central infrastructure resources and role, but they often have their own infrastructures and internally growing support roles. For example there is a fire department with many fire houses and their own jurisdictions with a central office and many roles there to fill in the gaps to ensure things get done and work as they should.

The human social interactions often scale to where people believe they may not be seen (well seen by those whom they know or know them) and are not familiar to many others around them. More granular distinctions are used to help people connect and have belonging and familiar social interactions. Cities require coordination for many social interactions at scale to take place and see things happen. Cooperation happens at the very small social scale, but often runs up against competition for resources and access from neighboring subsections of the city that drive it to coordination as the scaled social interaction model.

Cities function in complex social models. Gone is the regular ease of change with no impact on others. The ideal of cooperation is lost as there many different influences and pressures of the needs of other individuals and more often the needs and movement of groups that inhabit as well as run the city collide as their goals collide and conflict, even when trying to service the same purpose or goal.

Urban Planning at Scale

Differing urban scales have very different needs and realities around infrastructure, roles, social interaction design patterns and models that work or are needed. The small hamlet is often a focus, but the hamlet and its rather simple elements starts to become a limited model from which to view things with just a few hundred people. In cities this starts breaking at the one to two block boundaries. The village stage of growth and density, which kicks in with a few hundred people up to a the low thousands is often a good model to consider as a starting place (when considering social scaling for organizations the few hundred bounds hold up, if people are all in one location, but as soon as one or more additional locations are introduced the model looks a lot like the next step up to village with the complications that are introduced with the non-unified culture, multiple experiences and needs.

Urban Planning at Village Scale: Santana Row

Jumping in to the village perspective on social scaling, a good neat and clean view is that of Santana Row in San Jose, California. Santana Row is a 3 by 5 block grid of new urbanism mixed use and walkable planning (one of many of efforts by Federated Realty). It is a highly designed community that is an oasis or aberrant outlier in the whole of San Jose city, depending on one’s perspective. As stated by Gordon Ross' wife, “it is a great place to walk around if you drive there”.

Santana Row heavily proscribed design of space and use focusses the ground floors of the 3 to 5 story building to stores and restaurants and the upper floors for office and living space. It could be viewed as quasi-self supporting (lacking industrial and agricultural elements) for the roughly 1,000 people who live/work there. This village has a strong central management that proscribes use, design, and development of what happens in the bounds of the 3 by 5 grid bounds. It is not designed for emergence other than varying occupants of the spaces, which can be somewhat flexible, but it is largely held with in the already defined bounds.

As more natural social environs can grow, morph, and be emergent at, within, and beyond its initial bounds this planned village is less emergent and flexible. Use is constrained, for good or bad, by the heavily designed space. It is a social space that has set infrastructure, use, and size constraints that keep the development functioning with the same of similar vibe and experience across time.

Urban Planning at City Scale: San Francisco

If we take a quick drive up North of San Jose to San Francisco we can see social at a very different scale. San Francisco is home to 750 to 800 Santana Row by size and population. The map of San Francisco neighborhoods
(found at Justinsomina site) allows for some comparison with Santana Row. But, in a city the bounds between neighborhoods and sub-neighborhoods are drastically emergent and flexible over time. Even neighborhoods change drastically over time, just as the Hayes Valley neighborhood (a sub-neighborhood of the Haight) did after the 1989 earthquake and particularly after the freeway that bisected the neighborhood came down.

But, lets look at the center of this map and still at the Haight as a focus. The Haight as it is framed in this map is likely to contain 8 to 10 distinct neighborhoods with in it. Each of these neighborhood has its own feel and vibe as well as its own norms of acceptable business and behavior. The cultures of these neighborhoods can be vastly different, even as they abut other bounding neighborhoods.

The Haight contains the relatively famous Upper Haight, also known as the Haight Ashbury neighborhood that tries to keep its hippy culture mixed with the gentrified “painted lady” Victorian homes (some converted to multi-unit properties). Tie-dye and 60s hippy values are still at the forefront of this neighborhood’s feel and ethos.

Just down the hill from the Haight Ashbury is Lower Haight which is a mix of counter culture shops and establishments that mix with housing developments and through the 90s was known as the anarchist section of the Haight. There are no chain stores and there is a edge that is nearly tangible.

Heading up toward the Sutro Tower from the Haight Ashbury on Cole Street we are in Cole Valley, which is more family focussed than the Haight Ashbury and Cole Street has a mix of artisanal shops, restaurants, and bars. The family feel and more upscale offerings and comfortable places to hang out give it a different culture and values that what is found on Haight Street that it abuts just a few blocks away.

From Cole Valley we can head up Parnassus to the edge of the Inner Sunset neighborhood that houses UCSF Medical Center and a family and professional resident focussed neighborhood. The storefronts, restaurants, and living spaces all reflect this need and environment.

Small Neighborhoods Interwingled

What all of this gets to is a neighborhood framed in San Francisco with 15,000 to 100,000 people can have many smaller very divergent neighborhoods with in it. These neighborhoods have distinct culture, feel, and norms from what is proper activity and commerce for the sub-classification that may only be a few blocks by a few blocks. There are no firm borders and the boundaries are very fluid and intermix and intertwingle with ease. We know Cole Valley and the Haight Ashbury and Lower Haight are very different neighborhoods with interleaving boundaries and often with sub-neighborhoods emerging between them our of nothing.

All of this is emergent and at least complicated, but very much is a vivid description of complexity expressed and at play in the real world. The emergent and adaptive nature of cities, often with a very light hand of guidance (but in cases of Detroit and its massive contraction of population a more heavy hand can be a benefit). But, this reality helps us greatly understand the need for better understanding of human social environments at scale. We know that what works in one neighborhood will often not work in another neighborhood with out adapting it. Some neighborhoods in cities have strong neighborhood associations (some of these small active forces can change the whole of a city - see Harvey Milk (if you have time watch Milk) to get a better grasp of this at work).

As seen in the framing of physical spaces and the needs of the scaling social organization and infrastructure needed to support social scaling there are a wide variety of roles, support systems, different tools and disciplines (police, sanitation/waste, fire, health, property, finance, etc.), and central management roles for understanding as well as providing sane growth and adapting. In the time since 1996 when I started managing digital communities professionally, I started realizing and framing different social roles that were needed or at play and now have 20 I have framed and consider when dealing with social platforms and environments (see slide #64 in the presentation for the list of 20).

Social Business Software is Stuck at Simple

Given this realization that we have a variety of social scaling realities from out frame of looking at cities and other scale of human aggregation and organization in physical space, we can use the same lens to look at our own digital social environments. Most of our tools for social interaction and collaboration at best have two social roles, user and admin/community manager. The tools and ease of capabilities just are not there in many tools to help organizations using the tools beyond these simple roles.

Our tools are stuck at the Santana Row stage and are not easily emergent, adoptive, nor scale easily to more expansive realities. If the tool fits for one segment of the organization it is rolled out for more, whether or not their interest, needs, culture, or personality fits with in the designed constraints of a digital Santana Row. Our tools and services need to take the next step up to moving beyond the hamlet and village mentality of small, single focussed considerations.

A question that is always asked of me is what is the magic number for where these tools break and there is a need. The answer lies in understanding the essential variables: Cultural deviation, size, and location. If your organization has tight cultural norms and is rather unified in its view a simple social model can go rather far. Along this front how your organization handles when things do not go optimally (also state when things fail). The tighter the organization the greater a single or limited variance platform will take you. If you organization is rather accepting of things not going right and can turn problems into powerful lessons learned a single platform can scale. If the organization broadly doesn’t have good failure tolerance the scale of the service will be more limited, unless there are small comfortable spaces where ideas can be shared, vetted and honed before taking them broader. If the organization has no consistent way for dealing with failure or less than optimal outcomes a single simple platform will not go very far at all.

The size of your organization is another important variable. The larger the organization the greater the need for an adaptive multi-role and use services or collection of services. Few organizations can get away with a single approach with more than 3,000 to 5,000 people. There are some organizations that over time can get a very simple service to work across 15,000 or more. But, most often the tools start showing difficulty in the mid to upper 100s.

The last element is location. If your organization is all in one location or in very close proximity the ability for a simple tool to work at higher numbers of people using it is better, if the culture is consistent. Once you have more than one location things get more difficult as culture, norms, constraints, and other elements that impact use and consistency get strained. Think if a 400 unit high rise apartment building and the relative cohesion of community within that building, but another building next to it of the same or similar size can be quite different.

Social Scale Models

Another framing to think about this is simple social is two simple blocks resting next to each other sharing a side. The interaction point is just one common boundary and this simple difference is rather easy to maintain and interact along.

The complicated social model is a grid. The grid is working to balance the needs of needs around four different sides and how to balance the needs all around. The grid can be broken down in to rather straight forward interactions at the intersections of on the various sides, as long as those with whom they are interacting are staying relatively consistent.

Lastly, the complex is a fractal model that is always moving and the interactions are constantly shifting and each of the bounds are heading in a different direction and putting pressure and influence on those boundary elements it touches and interacts.

Next Steps

Where we often get with social tools and services inside organizations are a need for something beyond what we have. For a very long time social software has been framed through the lenses of understanding of social at scale. The common metaphors and framing echo some of the human social interactions used in the world around us that do not have mediated interfaces and services as the means of interacting.

Our tools and services need take the next step to getting beyond the simple social models were working in and around. The understanding of these next steps and there real existence can and will help shape how are tools can grow to meet our needs of social at scale and understand what is missing and needed to help people interact and be more efficient in their worklife. The individuals can get more out of this, but so with the organizations.

We have had 20 years or more of social software and collaborative tools now in its 3rd generation of services (KM, groupware, and now Enterprise 2.0/social business based on Web 2.0 principles) that we have dealt with and are living with. We have abandoned previous attempts as far less than optimal because the tools got in the way of how humans are social and did not allow for social scaling well. This current cycle has one hell of a lot of hope tied into is as the tools do a much better job of getting out of the way. Our next step is to start getting this still hopeful practice to embrace the understandings of social scaling.

Are you up for it? I am.

What Urban Planning Can Teach Us About Social Business Design

View more presentations from Thomas Vander Wal

Getting Beyond Simple Social

“Social is hard!” is something I hear repeatedly by most of my clients and those I talk to. It is one of the issues I continually run across in my work with organizations trying to better understand social software and collaboration tools for their organization as well as helping vendors better understand their gaps and how to close them as social scales.

I have my “40 Plus Social Lenses” that I use to set foundations and understandings to better see issues, gaps, and understand the potential ways forward. Everything requires testing and rarely does the good solution work everywhere as there are no best practices, because what we are working with is humans and how they are social. Humans and how we interact is not simple, we are not simple social creatures.

In January I quickly cobbled together a presentation for the UX Camp DC (a Washington DC User Experience community BarCamp) that I quickly titled “Getting Beyond Simple Social”, which I used as a frame for why most organizations are stuck with social (it is embedded at the end of this). Most organizations are stuck as they came to social thinking there are just a handful of things to understand and this social stuff is simple. I had a meeting with the senior partner at a huge global consulting firm who only wanted to know the best tool and if I could just boil down the 40+ Social Lenses to 2 or 3 as 40 is a bit tough (not only did the meeting end in my head at that point, but so did much of my respect for that firm), I explained to the end users and customers social needs to be simple, but in reality it is very complicated and complex and somebody has to work through that, which is what people hire consultants to work through for them and guide them through.

So, I cobbled together a few items from the 40 social lenses that I have presented prior, but included 2 new slides of things. The first is “Getting to Mainstream” (slides 4 through 8) and “5 Beginning Social Questions”.

Getting to Mainstream

Much of my work is helping organizations with social inside their firewall, which means bringing it to mainstream. In my years of working with social and collaboration services and platforms (since 1996) the tools haven't really changed much, other than now the tools get out of the way much more (in the 90s the answer to improving the tools was adding form fields, which is rarely ever the right answer, our technology has moved beyond that, we should too). But, the following are the reality setting steps I take with organizations and that took me years to grasp.

Inside the firewall the goal for social is ultimately 100 percent of the employees and/or partners. The measuring stick is often email, which is ubiquitous and a very familiar tool for everybody in the organization. Email is social and is something that everybody understands and has their face in at some point during the day. Many look at what is happening in social web services and seeing ease of communication and interaction, often in the open, which solves some of the pain points that are tied to email and email is everywhere.

What is lacking in the 100 percent goal is the understanding that email often took 5 years in most organizations to reach roughly 100 percent adoption and use. Having lived through the inception of email in a few organizations and then talking with friends about their organizations where they worked or consulted, the 5 year threshold was fairly normal. I don't know anybody who was actually measuring this broadly in their organization (Connections: New Ways of Working in the Networked Organization is a great book that will get you close to this as it walks through adoption and use patterns of email in companies).

Focus on Social

The focus is often on social by those looking for a solution uses the viewpoint of social web. But, much of what they see and have explained is not mainstream usage, but usage by early adopters and innovators (in the framing terms of Geoffrey Moore's Crossing the Chasm which uses a modified version of the Technology Adoption Lifecycle). The downside of much of the understanding around social through the view of early adopters or innovations, from their own perspective or others watching, is that is far from mainstream. The personality types and traits of this roughly 5 to 10 percent of the population are quite different from the norms of more mainstream users who follow later. Much of the understandings of the clicksperts who followed the trends and tried to make sense of things (often labeling themselves “social media gurus”) failed to grasp they were trying to explain the edges as the norm.

One of the most telling examples of this is from Twitter who explained 40 percent of our active users simply sign in to listen to what's happening in their world..

Understanding How the 90 Percent are Social

If we are going to focus on social for everybody we need to understand how the 90 percent who are not innovators and early adopters are social. Most people do not interact the way social is described by the clicksperts, social media gurus, or most of what is written up in Mashable (I spend so much time undoing what is written in Mashable as “understanding” - this was the impetus for my coming to grips with Popular - Thinking about it, which also applies to so many other things).

As we saw with email in the 1990s, social tools can reach the 100 percent. The BBCs wiki usage passed 100 percent adoption after 5 years of use. It takes time for adoption to happen, but it also takes guidance and modifying tools for use by mainstream. Euan Semple, who started and guided the BBC initiative as their head of knowledge management as a fantastic book out now, Organizations Don't Tweet, People Do: A Manager's Guide to the Social Web, if you want a good understanding from somebody else who has been living this.

5 Beginning Social Questions

Where I started getting to the reality of social and collaboration in 1996 I was managing a private Compuserve forum for 3,000 lawyers for a legal trade organization. I was continually running into issues pertaining to social problems. Having a solid academic background in social sciences with organizational communication and communication theory undergrad and public policy for grad school looking at human social interactions, particularly at social scale scale was something I had training for and experience with. But, having a mediated interface through a whole new perspective to think through.

I quickly realized there were a high level set of 5 questions I was continually coming back to so to try and solve some of the issues I was seeing with use and non-use of the service (I also spent a lot of time with the Compuserve product people talking about issues and means to resolve them). The 5 questions I asked started with trying to resolve, “Is it:…”

• The person
• How humans are social
• Cultural influences - or cross cultural issues
• Organizational constraints
• Problems with the tools / service

Never was the problem just one of these elements, but it was a mix of two or more of the elements. On very rare occasions it was just the person, but like many things where there is one instance there will often be more. These 5 simple beginning social questions get intermingled and tangled very quickly and are just the tip of the iceberg for all things social software that would follow for me.

The Person

The person is often the most common place to point with there is a problem or issue with social software. If it is seemingly a one-off problem keep good track of what it is, as quite often you are looking at social software's equivalent “patient zero” (also known in epidemiology as the index case) and understanding that one person's problems and issues as much as possible will help sorting out the real issues then if and what could or should be done to resolve the issues.

The downside with focussing on just the individual is everybody is different with their make up is different and has different experiences, has different cultural inflections, is a different personality type, has a different social role, as a different work role, and many other variables that influence who they are and their social interaction needs. Many of these variable or elements can be clustered with others with similar traits so that we are not dealing with an “every snowflake is different” syndrome, but need to at the core of it understand why every person (snowflake is different).

How Humans are Social

Understanding with some broad and unfocussed grasp of human sociality we need to look at if the problem at hand or the need in front of us is viewed from how humans are social. When we think in this perspective it is best not to use an innovator or early adopter perspective as they do things that are out of the norm (think of Mark Zuckerbergs egregious claim that people want to be openly social and nothing can be farther from the truth for most of human social experience, most humans normally are not wired to share everything openly and looking at those of us who are broken should not be mistaken for the norm). Thinking of how humans at scale or broadly generalized are social can help is a helpful perspective, but knowing what the real norm is, or the norm is for the relative cultures is helpful.

Cultural Influences - Cross Cultural Clash

How humans are social is often problematic as the norms we consider do not really translate well across cultures and particularly inside organizations. We do know that people with interact with others in smaller more comfortable venues, but who is included nor not included in the conversation or even simple sharing of things doesn't universally translate. I have twice run across people who have been working to solve lack of use of collaborative platforms that are shared between US/UK portion of the company and their Japanese counterpart. The core problem is in the forum groups the US and UK employees will share more openly and freely if their managers are not part of the discussion and do not have access to the group, but in Japan not having your manager in the discussion is seen as highly disrespectful and is something that employees should never do.

Not only does culture come from global cultural differences, but understanding an organizations culture is also essential as many times the organization has its own ingrained ways of handling things and its culture is broadly adopted through learning or other less formal enculturation patterns. Understanding what happens in the organization when something goes wrong is often a really good pulse point. Having the depth of understanding from change management professionals is helpful for sorting through an organization's baseline culture and the possibilities for modification to that existing perspective.

How and organization is managed and controlled is really helpful to understand as it often is echoed in how social software and collaboration tools are used and adopted. How malleable that corporate culture is will be very important to grasp at the stage of tool selection, because each tool and platform has its unspoken social interaction model that it echoes. Getting the wrong interaction model mapped to an organization's culture that runs counter to that organizations broad culture you will have issues. It is also important to keep in mind most organizations have many subcultures, which often makes one social interaction model difficult for adoption and optimal use.

Organization Constraints

Every organization not only has its own cultural fingerprint, but it is often constrained by external pressures, particularly if it is a publicly traded company, an organization in a heavily regulated industry, or has a lot of oversight as governmental and NGOs have with their public view and those that gave and review their charter. The external oversight along with rules and regulations as to what can be said, who can see it, who shouldn't see it, and formal record keeping all play an important role in use, as well as tool selection and its implementation.

This is also often intermingles with cross-cultural issues of roles in organizations as some, by their role (legal, HR, mergers and acquisitions, etc.) are far more restrictive and not prone to sharing or cooperation outside the bounds of their small trusted and approved collaborators working within their known bounds of permissions and sharing. Where as those in marketing roles are often far more comfortable interacting more openly and broadly and are willing to cooperate, but you take the sales slice of that marketing and you hit people who are heavily competitive and often have personality types prone not to share and are also rewarded and encouraged to be competitive (often with the mindset, you share with me as much as you want, but I'm am still competing heavily and sharing is not in my best interest at all - yes, heavily stereotypical and often for a reason).

Is it the Tool or Service

The medium that all of this social interaction takes place to get the work down plays a tremendous role in what works and doesn't work. As I pointed out recently in Social Reticence of a Click things as simple as a star to favorite things (as the only option for one of three different social intentions) can lead to serious problems (serious if getting fired is serious)). Most (I have yet to find one that actually grasps this, but I am open to being surprised) of the analyst firms out there have simple check boxes that do a tremendous dis-service to social software and collaboration services as the things that actually matter and are needed to be understood are not included in any of the check box mindset understandings of the world. The magic quadrant and other farcical measures don't help understand what is needed to make good choices and this often leads organizations to purchase the wrong tools for their needs.

Often the tools get in the way from our optimal interactions as many of the elements that are important to grasp as put forward above (as simply and thinly as they have been conveyed) were not grasped in the consideration, selection, purchasing, nor implementation and honing of the service. Far too often the tools have been created outside of the depth of understanding of human social interactions and implemented by IT whom, as was brilliantly broad brush stated by Maciej Ceglowski of Pinboard, is as relevant to do the work as having a Mormon bartender (having spent much of my professional life within IT and dealing with social this is as apt a metaphor as any).

The tool is often one of the pain points, as most do not embrace human social needs as they run counter to how humans are social. But, the tools is not always the part to blame.

It is A Mix

As it is with many things, it is not the individual pieces of this 5 part question looking to find a simple answer, but it is almost always a mix of some, if not all of these five elements. Our poorly thought through understanding that social is simple quickly hits reality that we must get beyond simple social understandings to understand how it is complicate and complex to we can move beyond. Looking at these five elements knowing which ones play what roles as part of the foundation of the problem set is essential, but having good data and understanding is needed, but also a solid understanding in of this panoply of intertwingled elements and how to best make an adaptive service that meets the needs of the people who have been waiting for a long time for a good social and collaborative service that meets their needs of business as it takes a larger step to better interactions in the work environment. Yes, most don't know they have been waiting, but most know the tools they have been strapped to in the past and often currently are not anything that they should be and often the tools and services are not really usable and IT spent money to create a problem rather than taking large strides to solve it. It is time to get beyond that, but doing so takes moving beyond the model of simple social.

Getting Beyond Simple Social

View more presentations from Thomas Vander Wal